Hal Brunson

Terrible Majesty (B&W) Hal Brunson

Black and White Version - In the last three decades, a renewed interest in aesthetics has arisen among some Christians. The Christian-classical school movement, with its emphasis upon classical languages, literature, music, and art has contributed to this resurgence of aesthetic sensibility, reinvigorating aesthetical discernment among its proponents regarding Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, an encouraging development that signals the partial recovery of a renewed aesthetical awareness that characterized the church at more thoughtful moments in her history; however, we say only a "partial recovery" of aesthetical awareness because, in terms of how the Bible characterizes sublime experience, the current emphasis upon Goodness, Beauty, and Truth is more Platonic than it is biblical, and therefore represents a deficient philosophy of aesthetics that leads to a misinterpretation of aesthetics biblically understood; a misrepresentation of The Sublime; and, most seriously, a mischaracterization of God. Those errors result from an oversight of an equally important fourth dimension of The Sublime - the fear of God - to which I refer in this book as Terror, also called Dread, or in Kierkegaardian and Nitzschean terms - Angst. As this book asserts, any biblically-based understanding of aesthetics must include not only Beauty, Goodness, and Truth but also Terror as an essential component of The Sublime, especially when sublime experience involves a direct encounter with Almighty God.